This Is England ’90: it’s bye-bye Thatcher, hello acid house

This Is England ’90: it’s bye-bye Thatcher, hello acid house

Over 10 years, Shane Meadows’s This Is England has followed the lives of disaffected 80s youth to become one of the most compelling TV series of the age. We talk to director and cast as the final instalment prepares to air

The new series of Shane Meadows’s This Is England is set in 1990, so nostalgia is – once again – required. Also an eagle eye for detail from the costume department, and hair and makeup. In a disused parking lot in Sheffield, dotted with the squat white trailers of a film set, actors wander, dressed in historical uniform. Some are resplendent in one-cig-and-you’re-ablaze shellsuits. Others have stuck to skinhead roots: Fred Perrys and Harringtons. There are ravers: Reni hats, dungarees, retina-refreshing T-shirts. Most of the extras are dressed with pinpoint accuracy: over-bleached bowl-heads, trousers like they’ve found their dad’s flares all crumpled at the bottom of the washing basket. There are… bandannas.

But it isn’t just the aesthetic recreation of 25 years ago that is bringing the flashbacks: the actors themselves are in memory mood. Almost a decade ago, Meadows cast the central group – a disparate crew that played characters Shaun, Woody, Lol, Gadget, Kelly, Harvey, Smell – in the original This Is England feature film. This was set in 1983, filmed in 2006, and for most of the actors it was their first ever professional acting job. Since then they’ve all worked on other projects but returned en masse for This Is England ’86 and ’88 – both award-winning, moving, funny, gritty television series – and, this year, This Is England’90, the four-part TV finale. After ’90 there will be no more This Is England, says Meadows. Though some cast members still hold out hope.

“If the stories are there, then why not?” says Joe Gilgun, who plays Woody. “And it’s an institution now, and you wouldn’t want to ruin that. So there might be a ’92, I’ve heard talk of it… But I’m sort of prepping myself for this being the end. And I’m devastated. Devastated.”

He’s not the only one. The wrap party was an emotional affair. Vicky McClure (Lol) speaks for most when she says: “This Is England is the job and the character I love the most. Lol is the character that’s closest to me in so many ways. So at the wrap I was a blubbering wreck…”

Now filming is over and Meadows is ensconced in the edit, where he will remain until the very last minute before the official press launch (he often changes entire storylines in the editing suite, and regularly wrings the neck of a deadline). This Sheffield cast reunion has been called by Channel 4: the station needs a photograph of the actors all together to use as promo.

So here are Thomas “Thommo” Turgoose (Shaun), Vicky McClure (Lol), Joe Gilgun (Woody, weirdly bearded), Andrew Shim (Milky). Milling around are Gadget, Harvey, Kelly, Smell (Andrew Ellis, Michael Socha, Chanel Cresswell, Rosamund Hanson). It is correct form to give you the actors’ names, though mostly they call each other by their cast titles. Only Thommo is always called Thommo. Michael Socha is often Mike, Vicky McClure can be Vicky on occasion, but the rest, from Milky to Gadge to Kelly are almost always their character. It’s understandable: back in 2005, when they began, the actors weren’t so different from the people they were playing.

Today they are overexcited, as they are when they’re all together. There are discussions as to what will be happening after the photoshoot: Turgoose, Ellis, Gilgun and Shim are on the rattle and want others to join them. “But I’ve got an audition in London tomorrow,” says Socha, “so I’m getting my cousin to come and pick me up. I made a get-out plan! I had to, they’re putting the pressure on.”

Channel 4 has restricted the on-shoot booze (“it’s not like the old days,” says one C4 employee), but still the cast manage to string out the photo session into late evening. It’s how they are when they’re together; over the years of filming, Sheffield has become used to a strangely tonsured gang wanting a big time on a Monday night. Still, the This Is England crew are not just here for each other’s fun times: Shim’s granny died a couple of weeks ago ,and Gilgun, McClure and others came to her funeral. As they all did when Turgoose’s mum died, in late 2005, a few weeks before the original film made it to the big screen.

“Oh yeah, we’re like family,” says Gilgun. “We’re here for each other. We know each other warts and all now, and we love each other. But we get on each other’s nerves. You get off the phone with one of them and you think, “Shut the eff up!” It’s not like you don’t want to be their friend any more – you love them to death and you could never see your life without them – but in that moment, they can knob off. Like family.”

Although Shane Meadows never planned to make a TV series out of his most successful film, once he’d started doing so, he knew he wanted to get to the 90s. He had a vision of an opening shot of someone putting an ecstasy tablet on to someone else’s tongue.

“Yeah, that does happen,” he tells me later, on the phone. “There are four episodes in This Is England ’90, and the summer episode is when the E thing kicks off. It’s not cool, though. At one point I thought, Yeah, I’ll hire 50,000 extras and get a proper rave going. But then I thought, No. In real life, the first time I went to a rave I got lost and ended up at a Pagan festival by mistake. And This Is England is like an antidote to cool, it’s like, this is what actually happened, and it was a bit wank.”

His initial post-movie idea, though, was just to “take the story of the gang broader and deeper”. He’d enjoyed working with the cast, he loved the characters, he felt as though there were stories left untold. A recap: in the original film, 12-year-old Shaun is being picked on at school and having a bad time until he meets an older skinhead crew, led by Woody. They take Shaun under their wing, drag him on a mad hunting trip, shave his head and dress him in jeans and braces to become a mini-boot-boy. All is going fine, until their small world is disrupted by Combo (Stephen Graham), a violent racist and former friend who returns after being in jail for three years. Combo is upset and he upsets things. Graham gives a powerhouse of a performance, dominating the second half of the film, and his character’s NF anger bullies aside the gentler, dafter characters to horrible effect.

In the TV series, however, Combo takes more of a back seat, and it’s the other characters that are explored. Shaun is still important, but This Is England ’86 and ’88 tell the tale of Lol and Woody, really: we see their relationship falter at the altar, watch Lol have an affair with Milky, Woody’s best friend. And Lol’s terrifying dad, Mick, played by Johnny Harris, returns to live with her, her sister Kelly and their mum. One particular scene in ’86 between Mick and Lol is shocking in the extreme, one of the most frightening I’ve ever seen on TV. It was hard to film too: Meadows let the cameras roll for 50 minutes without cutting, and made McClure stay away from the rest of the cast during the series (living in a separate flat, no hanging out at the pub), to mimic the isolation Lol felt. McClure hated it but understood why he made her do it.

All the actors tell me that Meadows works completely differently from any other director they’ve worked with. Although there is always a script, written by Meadows and Jack Thorne, he actively discourages the cast from learning their lines. Instead he’ll sit down with whichever actors are in the scene for as long as an hour before the crew are allowed on set, and have a chat “about something random, like boxing”. Sometimes the actors are given beats, emotional places they need to get to. Sometimes they’re not told what’s going to happen at all, just that they’re, say, about to go to a cafe and to see what happens. Or that there’s going to be a fight.

There is a lot of improvisation, then; in the film and first TV series this sometimes led to overly talky scenes, with everyone in the group trying to chip in, make their mark. As the series have progressed, though, the actors have become less manic, more aware of who should be talking, where the emotion lies.

What Meadows doesn’t want is acting, says Jo Hartley, who plays Cynthia, Shaun’s mum. “Shane doesn’t really like trained actors,” she says. “He likes people who are real, with big energy and presence, he wants their original essence, vulnerability and strength.” He wants reality.

Hartley was one of the first on board for This Is England (Meadows met her while casting for a commercial for the Sun) and she saw how he recruited the rest of the actors, some from Nottingham’s Central Drama Workshop (now Television Workshop), most from open castings. The most difficult character to cast was Shaun. Right up until a few days before filming, Meadows hadn’t found the right kid.

Turgoose was excluded from school and came along to the casting simply because he saw a queue outside his local youth centre (now closed). He said he’d only audition if he was paid. “Every audition I did, it went up,” he says. “From a fiver to a PlayStation game to a mobile phone, or I wouldn’t come.” Hartley ran a scene with him and he made her cry, and Meadows looked at her, and she knew.

This Is England rescued Turgoose, he says: “I was destined for prison.”

Joe Gilgun was so busy plastering a ceiling he nearly didn’t come to the call-back. Many of the cast’s lives were changed utterly by Meadows casting them. “We’re all basically fucked up,” says Hartley. “Shane gets us all. He’s like Fagin – he puts us all together and gets us working for him while he feeds us porridge and gives us a place to stay. And tells us to fuck off if we ask for more money.”

Hartley’s character is vital in This Is England: a constant background presence, providing Shaun with love, showing his tender, funny side. She is one of two characters that don’t get much acknowledgement. The other is Margaret Thatcher. In the original film, Thatcher is the second individual we see (first up: Roland Rat), and her pronouncements on the Falklands war are peppered throughout the story. Shaun’s dad has been killed in the Falklands, which is one of the reasons why he’s teased (the other is his trousers, which are wide-legged – prematurely Madchester). A visual parallel is drawn between the frustrated racists of the National Front and the Little Englander heroics of the Falklands soldiers. (Combo pulls Shaun over to his side by pointing out the uselessness of that particular war.)

I’ve seen the first episode of This Is England’90, and like every other instalment it has a scene-setting real-footage montage very early on. In it we see Thatcher resign. (We also see Gazza cry, Strangeways riot, cows go mad.) This Is England now stretches from 1983 to 1990, and it isn’t hard to see it as an alternative history of Thatcherism, as how her prime ministership affected – or didn’t – those over whom she had power.

“The first time I was ever aware of politics was in 1979 when she came to power,” says Meadows, “because at my primary school there were loads of animals – donkeys, rabbits, all different animals. And I remember coming home – I was only eight or nine – and saying to my dad: ‘Dad, all the animals have gone away.’ And then a bit later, saying to my mum: ‘I don’t like the carrots at school lunch any more, they’re horrible…’ It’s weird, as a kid, to notice stuff and not realise that it was because there was someone different in power.”

Crappy jobs, crumbling flats, dull poverty: all hallmarks of the Thatcherite years. Those of us who lived through them connect with This Is England because of its truth. The Co-op crockery, the aspirational telly, the pouffed clothes for posh, the pubs-shut atmosphere: all bring back the scent of white bread and margarine, if not madeleines. And now ’90… When I watched the first episode the Proustian rush was strong, mostly because I didn’t feel as though 1990 was all that far back (25 years? In the blink of an eye). But also, aside from the music, the spectacle of Tories in power – their smug faces as they busily dismantle people’s lives – resonates today. That sick feeling you had on 8 May this year? That feeling was there throughout the 1980s. Some of us are old enough to remember.

The cast on location for This Is England ’86, a 2010 Channel 4 mini-series. Photograph: Channel 4

And we can also recall the alternative worlds – created like magic from their own lives – that people made to compensate. Youth movements were key. Skinheads, casuals, mods, acid house… Madchester is where we get to in ’90, and it’s a Madchester night that we see in its opening episode. Not a full-on Friday night in the Hacienda but a one-off Stone Roses/Happy Mondays/Charlatans-fest in the town hall.

This is directly pulled from Meadows’s own experience; he grew up in Uttoxeter and went to the local, not-very-cool Madchester night. This Is England is semi-autobiographical: Shaun Fields is based on the young Shane Meadows (Meadows was isolated, and picked on at school after his dad was mistakenly identified as a murder suspect). Meadows, too, fell in with a gang of older kids. He, too, was inspired by the Madchester scene, as were Jo Hartley (she was a Hacienda regular) and producer Mark Herbert.

“1990 doesn’t seem that long ago,” says Herbert. “But there were no mobiles, no internet, no social media, and it was the last time where music was swapped around – you’d have a mixtape, you’d go to a rave, nobody knew where the rave was, and that was really exciting. So with this series you have knowledge and memories and you can go: ‘That’s what the flats were like, and this is what the discos were like, and this is what it was like getting lost in the Peaks’. I’d say that it’s been the most cinematic of the lot because of that.”

Actually, This Is England’90 would have been out in 2013 but Meadows was commissioned by the Stone Roses – his favourite ever band – to make a documentary (Made of Stone) about their reunion. I interviewed him then, and he was inspired by the whole experience. Not just because he got to hang with his heroes but also because filming the doc expanded his directorial skills. He had control over several large camera crews to catch the live gigs – “it wasn’t just two people arguing in a council flat,” as he said to me – and This Is England’90, though nowhere near as big a production, has, I am assured, some cinematic clubbing scenes with lots of extras. This time round, Lol and Woody are settled, Milky too, and the action is centred on the younger members: Gadget, Harvey, Kelly, Shaun. No one will tell me what happens after the first episode, but I get the feeling it won’t all be hands-in-the-air.

For, despite Meadows’s cinematic chops, This Is England’90 also has the small stuff; the stuff at which Meadows excels. Grotty council flats where locals go to score minuscule amounts of weed. Macho fools enacting ludicrous sex-and-drug-taking rituals. Horrible mismatches of musical tastes (goths at a rave, also mods, also 1980s mustachioed throwbacks). Friends who don’t choose each other but grow up together from child to adult, bound by their history, never moving far away.

Like the cast. “When we started,” says McClure, “none of us were that far away from our characters really. At that point I was very close to Lol. But now I couldn’t be further from her really – 31 is massively different from 21. Some of the others were so young they had chaperones when they started… We’ve all forged characters that are much further away as we’ve gone through. But, still, I don’t really feel like we’re ever going to wrap from This Is England. We’re always in contact. I get group messages at two in the morning that do my head in, phone nonstop pinging…”

“It’s because this is natural,” says Turgoose. “We’ve all known each other for so long, we are all from similar backgrounds – we weren’t born with a silver spoon – and we’ve all seen the other side of life, the gritty side to life. And we’re not all oil paintings, and we can all just relate. We trust each other with our lives, and that isn’t going to change.”

Shane Meadows Q&A

Director Shane Meadows, on the set of This Is England ’90 with Chanel Cresswell: ‘I love these characters and I love these people.’ Photograph: Channel 4

Hello Shane, glad to hear you finished it all in time...Yes, we’re all here, at the launch event, everyone’s very excited. The gang are a bit drunk. Actually, they’re not much different when they’re drunk than when they aren’t. Always high energy. Like a kitchen-sink Fame Academy.

How were your Madchester years?My first rave, I was with my mate Fraser - Paul Fraser, he wrote a few films with me - anyway, we got lost and couldn’t find it, and we drove around and heard this bass - boom boom boom - and followed it, and went up this hill. And at the top we saw a white witch and a sword. We’d somehow got to a pagan festival instead. They were selling Fimo necklaces and those Irish drums. It was typical me. I never was cool.

Didn’t you have a classic bleach-blond wedge haircut and red dungarees? Also … a moustache?Completely correct. My sister was a hairdresser and I had really dark hair, so the colour was that orangey-golden colour, and I had a mussie but it was a bit gingery. My look was, I had a casual head with a pseudo drama college body. Or a Harry Enfield scouser head and Shaun Ryder’s arse. I was 16 but I looked 42.

Margaret Thatcher features on and off throughout This Is England, and in the new series you show her bowing out…She was like a character in Game of Thrones wasn’t she? She was like the ultimate über-baddy, and she seemed to have wide enough shoulders to bear it. I was kicking against her my whole youth but I didn’t realise that it was her I was kicking against. And at the beginning of this series, I was like, God, 1990 is when she leaves, and There She Goes was the most important song of that time, so I put that over the montage, and she got a hero’s exit. An anti-hero’s. I’ve not tried to put a political slant into This Is England. I’m not clever enough really, but she’s definitely played a part.

The cast say you change stories all the time while you’re filming – how does that work?There was a storyline that was going to unfold this series, and up until two weeks before the end of filming I didn’t know which one of three people was going to get that storyline. It was something quite heavy, but I honestly didn’t know. A load of arrows get shot off at the beginning of the story and it’s just where they’re going to land... How do I work out who will get it? Sometimes it happens in a rehearsal, or sometimes you might film a scene and it doesn’t quite work with that person so you try it again and you realise it isn’t meant for them. So you try it with someone else.

Is this really the end of This Is England? It does feel like the end, at the moment. We’ve made a worthy end and we’ve given everything to it. It’s not like we’ve had a fire and burned them four times to make sure they’re dead, or done a Bobby Ewing and revealed that Shaun was just tripping in the Amazon. I love these characters and I love these people, so I wouldn’t rule it out… But as it stands, that’s it.

If it goes on for many more years, you’d have to have Shaun [played by Thomas Turgoose] going to film school…What’s weird about that is that Thommo’s got into photography recently. He’s got an eye for composition – we’ve got a similar sensibility, so it’s a lovely symmetry. With This Is England I often think there’s something cosmic going on. Like with the original film, the bit that was never autobiographical was that Shaun had lost a parent. And then within three months of us finishing his mum had passed away. Also, there was something that nearly unfolded in ’86 and ’88 and I felt like it would be pushing it to have it then, so I waited seven years, and it’s only just come out in these episodes. There’s a sense sometimes with this series that the universe has a heartbeat and you can choose to listen to it or not, and I always have listened.

Are there stories still left to tell?You know, when we started, I came across this incredible group of actors - I mean, I always work with great actors but there was something about them that reminded me of people I knew. And in the film, Woody and Lol have to play second fiddle to Shaun, so it was great to be able to let them tell their story in ’86 and ’88. There’s still a lot of Shaun in ’90, and also Harvey and Gadget and Kelly come forward, so it’s all more even-handed – they end up as their own little gang.

But you know what? There’s Lol’s mum and Woody’s mum and dad. I’d like to put them together and see what happens. I’d take them to Skegness in a caravan and film them for a week.

The cast on ’90…

Vicky McClure as Lol in This Is England ’88: ‘When I work with Shane, the job becomes my everything.’ Photograph: Tristan Hopkins

Vicky McClureVicky McClure has played lead character Lol throughout the This Is England project, winning the best actress TV Bafta in 2011 for This Is England ’86. Aged 15, her first acting job was with Shane Meadows on his 1999 film A Room for Romeo Brass. McClure has gone on to star in the acclaimed TV dramas Line of Duty and Broadchurch.

The way Lol is left at the end of ’88, with Woody taking on some of the pain for her, is right. I’m happy that ’90 starts with her not in another major tragedy. Lol is happy, she’s with Woody, in a tidy little place, they’ve got kids, they’re a functioning little family. Milky’s a very good dad, in fact there’s a joke that Jimmy (Woody’s son) gets on better with Milky, and Lisa (Milky’s daughter) gets on better with Woody.

I was born in 1983, so ’90 is creeping up to where I can remember. Also, because Lol and Woody have two little kids in this series, their house has crap everywhere, and the kids’ clothes, their toys, the things on telly, I can remember all that. And the house looks like your house in the 90s, with that horrible carpet, and the lampshades are the same, and all the kitchen utensils, those brown plates with circles round the edge, everybody had them.

When I work with Shane, the job becomes my everything. It’s like when you go home to your mum and dad’s, you turn back into being a child again, and I revert back into needing Shane’s support. He’s always coaching everybody in their separate ways, knowing what would work for each person. If you do a scene more than once, it’s always different, and each time there’s always something that comes out that’s a little bit special. There’s one scene in this series that’s amazing, and it was just one take. We didn’t rehearse, we just stayed true to our characters and it worked.

I love sitting in the edit with Shane. He creates brand new stories, and you think, how has he got from this to this? In 88 he was trying to cut a scene and I was like, You’re mad, you can’t cut that scene but he’s so precise in what he wants, the music, how it fits. But there are often some changes and in this series there was, and what happens is he wants to get stuff shot before we’ve all changed our hair, so he’ll be like, Right, let’s come back and try something different and those bits he always uses. He takes other cast members into the edit too, to show them their work – he’s not precious. He believes that we’re all in it together. Maybe that’s a 90s attitude as opposed to now. Now, we’re all separate on our phones, aren’t we?

Chanel Cresswell in This is England ’90: ‘Kelly is heading for a dark place in this series.’ Photograph: Channel 4

The characters Kelly, Gadget and Harvey appeared in the original This Is England film as young teens – Kelly as the little sister of Lol (Vicky McClure), Gadge as a member of the skinhead gang that Shaun (Thomas Turgoose) falls in with and Harvey as a bully at Shaun’s school. In This Is England ’90, they are young adults, and their stories come to the fore.

Chanel CresswellKelly

I was born in 1990 so I recognise certain props and toys. Filming this was like an echo… Kelly is heading for a dark place in this series. With her dad dying, that was massive for her, she really listened to him, even if she didn’t believe him. She wanted that stable family unit. Then putting that with drugs, going out, dancing, sometimes that spins you completely the wrong way emotionally, so you see that tornado of events…

I’ve learned on the job, and I witnessed Vicki (Lol) going through her bad time, and I learned from her. And Shane, of course. I trust him with everything. There are some sets where there’s a lot of really heart-wrenching stuff you have to do, but if you don’t have the right environment, it’s more difficult to get out. I went from just watching, and being in awe of these people, and finally Shane was like: “Right, you have a go this time.”

When I started with This Is England, I was 15, 16, and I remember someone saying: “You do know you’ll have to shave your hair off?” And I totally thought they were joking. But I was quite determined at 15. I was going through a lot at that time and Shane picked me out of a crowd… I felt like I had won the lottery and This Is England helped me find a better way.

I can’t tell you what happens in this series, but I can say that, with Gadge, it spirals down. It’s a rollercoaster of a ride. I was born in 1990 and I grew up on a council estate in the middle of Manchester, so for me the biggest influence was the music – growing up in Manchester I think it’s embedded into you. I felt I knew the era. It looks like a really cool time to have been around.

When I got This Is England the film, I was 14 years old. I’d been and done the auditions and then I had a “callback”, but I didn’t know what a callback was. I’d always known that I’d wanted to be an actor but never thought it would be possible. My mum rang up agencies. She said: “My son’s got this part in a film” and they’re like: “OK, but we’re not really taking anyone on.” And she went: “OK, can you give me any advice? It’s this film with Shane Meadows.” And then suddenly it was like: “Oh, we have got a vacancy!”

The past 10 years I’ve been finding a way around the industry. It can be tough, watching my mates, who’ve all got full-time jobs, doing things that I couldn’t because I was waiting on phones to ring. Being skint and living of